European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents

Description

"The introductory essay is superb, the best short introduction to Romanticism I know. It is comprehensive, covering both the wide range of spheres that Romanticism affected-literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, nationalism-and the broad spectrum of European countries in which it was an influential cultural current. It offers a distinctive, unified interpretation of Romanticism that nonetheless does justice to the complexities of Romantic ideas." Gerald Izenberg, Washington University in St. Louis

Warren Breckman is the Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe, his other books include Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (1999) and Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-marxism and Radical Democracy (2013). He is the executive co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

"The complexity and range of European Romanticism cannot be conveyed to students by assigning only one or two texts; at the same time, students need a clear and confident guide if they are not going to become lost in a maze of texts and interpretations. Breckman' book meets these competing demands. His Introduction, in particular, provides one of the clearest and most coherent accounts of Romanticism that I have ever read, one that is informed by recent trends in literary criticism and philosophy but that keeps its focus firmly on the Romantics themselves." --George Williamson, University of Alabama